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Supremacy or Death. That was not what the settlers had wanted at all, and the constitution turned out to be a death blow to the government. Under a barrage of charges that it was soft on Africans, the United Party was swept out of office in elections the following year. A new party, built on a hard core of cattlemen, tobacco men and right-wing labor leaders, was on the rise; its platform was white supremacy or death, and its founder was Ian Smith.
Ian Douglas Smith, 46, is Rhodesia's first native-born Prime Minister. His father came to the land from Scotland in 1898, settled down to make his fortune as a gold miner, cattle farmer and butcher in the town of Selukwe, 180 miles southwest of Salisbury. "My father rubbed shoulders with Cecil Rhodes," Smith says proudly. "He was one of the fairest men I have ever met, and that is the way he brought me up. He always told me that we're entitled to our half of the country and the blacks are entitled to theirs."
At Selukwe high school, young Ian paid little attention to his studies, but was a champion sprinter and captain of his cricket, tennis and rugby teams. (Noted his school magazine: "Good on attack, but does not always time his passes well.") An R.A.F. fighter pilot during the war, he was shot down on a strafing mission over North Africa, escaped with a broken leg and a badly mutilated face. After plastic surgery in Cairo, he emerged with a drooping right eyelid, an immobile expression, and a brand-new face that the surgeon might almost have copied from pictures of Gary Cooper.
At war's end Smith went to South Africa to take a business course at Rhodes University, then returned home to Selukwe, where he fell in love with an attractive young schoolteacher named Janet Watt. They were married in 1948, and Smith decided that he would enter politics. "I thought he was crackers," recalls his wife, "but no one can influence my husband once he has made up his mind."
The Rhodesia Smith inherited was not conciliatory either. When the United Party decided to accept the 1961 constitution, Smith resigned in a rage—and immediately received a telegram of congratulations from archconservative Tobacco Tycoon Douglas Collard Lilford. "Ian Smith, and Ian Smith alone, was the one to get up and say no," recalls "Boss" Lilford. "He was the only blessed one to resign. This man has steel in him." Smith drove out to Lilford's estate near Salisbury, talked the tobacco man into helping him found the Rhodesian Front to preserve "Rhodesia for the Rhodesians."
With Lilford paying most of the bills and Smith in charge of organization, the Rhodesian Front sprouted like mealies on the veld at Gatooma. All the rightist fringe groups, including the Dominion Party of Contractor William John Harper (now Internal Affairs Minister), got into the act, as did such present powers as South Africa-born Lawyer Desmond Lardner-Burke